So were new household appliances and even the construction of new homes. Many of the new workers were women.įrom 1942 until 1945, the manufacture of cars was banned. Between 1940 and the end of the war, the number of American troops rose 26-fold, while the civilian labour force increased by 10 million. The US war effort mobilised tens of millions of people. It was the realisation of a well-laid plan. Roosevelt described it as a “miracle of production”. During its three years of war, the US manufactured 87,000 naval vessels, including 27 aircraft carriers, 300,000 planes, 100,000 tanks and armoured cars and 44bn rounds of ammunition. By 1944, Ford was completing a long-range bomber plane almost every hour. Oldsmobile started making artillery shells Pontiac produced anti-aircraft guns. General Motors began turning out tanks, aircraft engines, fighter planes, cannons and machine guns. When the car industry was instructed to switch to military production, its massive equipment was immediately jack-hammered out of the floor and replaced, often in a matter of weeks, with new machines.
From 1940 to 1944, its military budget rose by a factor of 42, outstripping Germany’s, Japan’s and the United Kingdom’s put together.Ĭivilian industries were entirely retooled for war. Astonishingly the US government spent more money (in current dollar terms) between 19 than it had between 17. Between 19, total government spending rose roughly tenfold. It issued war bonds and borrowed massively. The government rapidly raised the top rate until, in 1944, it reached 94%. He introduced, for the first time in US history, general federal income taxes.
WARLIKE SOCIETY SERIES
He set up a series of agencies that were lightly overseen but coordinated through simple but effective measures such as the “controlled materials plan”. He immediately began to reorganise not only the government but the entire nation. The day after the attack, Roosevelt requested and achieved a declaration of war from Congress. But after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, the impossible happened. To “outbuild Hitler”, he called for levels of production widely considered impossible. And we would be foolish not to learn from this remarkable lesson.īefore the US declared war, President Franklin Roosevelt had begun to draft troops and build his “arsenal of democracy”: the materiel with which he supplied the allied forces.
But the war is among the few precedents and metaphors that almost everyone can grasp. There’s discomfort in environmental circles with military analogies. It’s what happened when the US joined the second world war. There’s a bigger and more powerful example. Let’s set aside the obvious lessons of the pandemic, when the magic money tree miraculously burst into leaf, governments discovered they could govern (albeit with varying degrees of competence) and people were prepared radically to change their behaviour.
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